The Meta

Micro Focus offer accepted by Borland

After a protracted battle where it had to raise its offer by 50%, Micro Focus has finally gained approval from 99% of Borland’s shareholders. The bottom line is that Micro Focus is paying a premium for Borland. Entering the QA (Quality Assurance) market won’t be easy, and Micro Focus has paid dearly for the chance

From the point that it announced the dual offers for all of Borland and for Compuware’s testing tools, Micro Focus has been very clear about its goal: it wants to enter the software quality assurance and testing portion of the ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) market and needs to maximize the splash to do so.

The obvious question is what made once venerable Borland, a company that has gone five years without a profitable quarter, worth all the fuss? Borland had some promising products, especially with new offerings for project portfolio management, but that was all they were – promising. The crux of the problem was that Borland’s sales force was simply unable to execute the long sales cycle strategic deals that it needed to survive.